From Christianity to Judaism: The Story of Isaac Orobio de Castro (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization) - Hardcover

Inhaltsangabe

Translated from the Hebrew, this is a biography of Isaac Orobio de Castro, born Baltazar Alvares, a crypto-Jew from Portugal who was one of the most prominent intellectual figures of the Sephardi Diaspora in the 17th century. After studying medicine and theology in Spain and having pursued a medical career, he was arrested by the Spanish Inquisition for practising Judaism, tortured, tried and imprisoned. He subsequently emigrated to France and became a professor of medicine at Toulouse before openly professing his Judaism and going to Amsterdam in 1662, where he joined the thriving Portuguese Jewish community. Amsterdam was then a city of great cultural creativity and religious pluralism. Here Orobio became a spokesman and apologist for the Jewish community and engaged in controversy with Juan de Prado and Baruch Spinoza, who were both excommunicated by the Portuguese Jewish community, as well as with Christian theologians including Philip Van Limborch. This biography considers the life and the thoughts of Orobio, who became one of the foremost spokesmen of Sephardic Judaism in western Europe at this time.

The text also sheds light on the life of a unique Jewish community of former Christians who had openly turned to Judaism. It focuses on the particular dilemmas of the converts, their attempts to establish boundaries between their Christian past and their new identity and their ability to create new forms of Jewish life and expression.

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